vow

I vow to love every moment as much as I love this slam-on-the-brakes-and-take-a-picture-of-birds moment and as much as I may seem to be obsessed with some perfect wild world I realize that I don't give much credit to the roughly 43,000 other moments in a day.  For instance, this is not a photo about the daily fought and won battle to drag an 11 year-old boy out of bed, nor is it about the narrowly averted flatware crisis, nor the beautiful (and i mean truly remarkable) food that my lovely and extraordinary students make.  It is not about the e-mails that I answered, and the ones that I didn't -- likewise projects completed and those still hanging.  It is not about tooth fillings that last longer than Novocain. It is not about zombie ninjas and company returning from a night's prowl with mud-streaked pillowcases of booty smelling like sugar, fish, and rain.  It is not about nachos for dinner or 20 text messages that say come tuck me in.  It is also missing a trumpet solo.

wild

A Meeting

She steps into the dark swamp
where the long wait ends.

The secret slippery package
drops to the weeds.

She leans her long neck and tongues it
between breaths slack with exhaustion

and after a while it rises and becomes a creature
like her, but much smaller.

So now there are two. And they walk together
like a dream under the trees.

In early June, at the edge of a field
thick with pink and yellow flowers

I meet them.
I can only stare.

She is the most beautiful woman
I have ever seen.

Her child leaps among the flowers,
the blue of the sky falls over me

like silk, the flowers burn, and I want
to live my life all over again, to begin again,

to be utterly
wild.

-Mary Oliver

shift

Perfect grey day in a new season.  Being outside is never the problem.  It is the solution. It does, however, require a shift.  More clothes, heavier shoes.  I ran first -- but it felt like a fight so I gave myself up to wind and this.   

These are all pictures made in motion -- mine, the wind, Bach.  I want to call it dancing. I'm pretty sure we don't do enough of that.  

bone

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show. 

Andrew Wyeth 

ft. worth blues

field notes

I have felt the weight of words lately but the universe is not one to be forced to speak or sing just because I said so.  Instead I make biscuits, and meatballs, and soup from squash and apples and fennel seeds.  I am comforted by my kitchen cocoon, woven over glass between oven-warmed air and north wind.  I run a race at a breath-taking pace with my sweet friend and we hold hands over our heads like school girls as we cross the finish line.  I drink red wine.  I listen to Bach.  I sleep restlessly.  I feel the moon even though I cannot see it.  I walk in the changed woods ... waiting.  

illume

Fall is divided into two parts.  First a vibrant final burst of energy and then the spare days and longer nights that lead into winter.  We have reached -- passed -- reversible momentum, which is a funny phrase because there is no such thing when it comes to seasons.  But, in the nick of time I plucked these chrysanthemums to study in some pale morning light.  

venus at dawn

 

...through nearly bare limbs.

cowboy poetry

 

It is not unusual, in the course of my everyday, to spend some time talking about food. In that regard, today was not exceptional, except that for some reason the conversation worked its way around to cows and then the question was posed, "Can you imagine what it would be like if there were no cows?"  My response was immediate and out of my mouth before I had a chance to realize that it really didn't have much to do with food, "If there were no cows, then there would be no cowboys."

I was already in that kind of mood -- cowboys on the brain and stuff.  Apparently it wasn't a coincidence that I had given Lyle some airtime this morning as I drove through the narrow streets of my mid western town.  And while I am happy to be anywhere, just happy to be, maybe it is because I am perfectly capable of comprehending that in a parallel universe I'm out on open roads, threading my way through sand and sage beneath enormous skies.  

yesterday

I walked the same trails this afternoon and these leaves are mostly gone but what I wanted to remember about yesterday was how the leaves made me think of Klimt and wonder, did he look at leaves and light and see that one might paint everything with them in mind?

other worlds

More souvenirs from journeys into the micro world here at this new favorite source for inspiration.

attention

The greatest effort is to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself, in your life, giving full attention to the world...  I'm against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head.  You don't.

-Susan Sontag

life is long

chase

...Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant. 
Not important whether the generations hold us in memory. 
Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of 
the world. 

And now I am ready to keep running 
When the sun rises beyond the borderlands of death. 
I already see mountain ridges in the heavenly forest 
Where, beyond every essence, a new essence waits. 

You, music of my late years, I am called 
By a sound and a color which are more and more perfect. 

Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love. 
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
-Czesław Miłosz, from Winter

who said girls can't

For some reason my chores this afternoon left me with an irresistable desire to hear this song:


and in the truest spirit of procrastination, I could not rest (get back to work) until I found this:

Mad skills -- I can't even walk in heels.

love

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many. 
And whoever sees that way heals his heart, 
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. 

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness. 
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves: 
Who serves best doesn’t always understand. 
--Czeslaw Milosz

interstate love song

This still meets all my requisites for a favorite song.  Just because I posted the acoustic version doesn't mean that I don't play the original studio recording in my car -- loudly -- with the windows down.  

make me a pallet...

field notes

I'm redundant:  Leaves and light.  Currently my most preferred "now" -- I race into their sacred spaces that belong on the same list as churches and libraries, museums, haylofts, kitchens ... and some truck stops.